College football set its New Year’s Day playoff lineup this weekend as more post season bowl games were cancelled due to concerns revolving around the pandemic.

Top-ranked Alabama will face fourth-ranked Notre Dame in the Rose Bowl and second-ranked Clemson will battle third-ranked Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl. The winners will play in the College Football Playoff National Championship on Jan. 11. ESPN will air all three games.

The weekend playoffs announcement comes as several other college bowl games were cancelled, as a number of teams from major conferences have chosen not to play in the postseason due to concerns surrounding the pandemic.

ESPN Events Sunday cancelled the upcoming TicketSmarter Birmingham Bowl, one of 16 post season college football bowl games now canceled. Currently, 28 bowl games are scheduled to be played beginning tonight (Dec. 21) with the Myrtle Beach Bowl featuring North Texas against Appalachian State.

“We have made the difficult decision to cancel the TicketSmarter Birmingham Bowl,” said Mark Meadows, executive director in a statement. “As the inventory of available teams lessened, our ability to stage the game was compromised. We will direct our focus to next year’s bowl, and look forward to staging the game in the 2021 season.”

ESPN, on the strength of its college football playoff coverage, was the most watched cable network in primetime for the month of January, according to Nielsen.

ESPN’s Jan. 8 Georgia-Alabama College Football Playoff  National Championship game telecast drew 27 million viewers, the most watched cable show thus far in 2018.

ESPN averaged 2.9 million viewers during the week of Jan. 1 to Jan. 28 to beat out Fox News Channel’s 2.4 million viewers, said Nielsen. MSNBC was third with 1.8 million viewers, followed by HGTV’s 1.5 million viewers and USA Network’s 1.3 million watchers.

Fox News was tops among all cable networks on a 24-hour basis with 1.4 million viewers, followed by ESPN (1.1 million), MSNBC (1 million), Nickelodeon (988,000), Investigation Discovery (871,000) and HGTV (863,000).

On the heels of its second-straight yearly win in the primetime ratings, ESPN will look to score another cable ratings record with its Jan. 11 telecast of the College Football Playoff Championship Game between Clemson and Alabama. Last year, a cable-record 33.6 million viewers watched Ohio State defeat Oregon in the inaugural title game.

ESPN senior vice president of global research and analytics Artie Bulgrin recently spoke with Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead about the 24-hour sports network’s ratings success in 2015, and how well it expects to score with the championship game. In a wide-ranging interview, he also handicapped the the network’s odds for a threepeat in the yearly primetime ratings.

UPDATE:Alabama-Clemson Game Fails to Score Ratings Record

MCN:Were you surprised by ESPN’s second-straight strong primetime ratings performance in 2015?

Artie Bulgrin: This is actually extraordinary, because last year was the first year we won primetime across the board, and now we’ve done it again this year. I think the reason for this is primarily because sports and live programming is what we are virtually all day long, and that’s proving to be a significant advantage in a world where virtually everything else can be time-shifted.

We are in a TV world that’s going through a period of tremendous fragmentation. There’s more choice than ever before, particularly in primetime. Our events are performing extremely well and holding up year after year; there’s virtually no erosion to our events. What’s happening here is that among sports fans — young and old, male and female — sports programming moves up in the hierarchy of live television viewing when they are making their television choices.

MCN:Going into 2016, are you confident you can keep the streak going?

AB: I think we can, because we have the rights to the biggest live sports events and our news and information is still a huge draw for us and will continue to be so. At the same time, we know sports fans are using ESPN in different ways across numerous platforms.

Our cross-platform connection to our fans each and every day, all day long, enables us to stay connected to our viewers on any platform and eventually navigate them to our Monday Night Football, college-football or college-basketball telecasts any night of the week. We are the quintessential cross-platform media company, and our reach across platforms allows us to stay in contact with our fans across the day, which is a really big deal.

MCN:Does ESPN’s primetime win vindicate the network after many pundits questioned its ability to remain the sports leader after suffering sizeable subscriber losses?

AB: I don’t know if it’s vindication or not, but we have plenty of viewers out there. Sports fans are still connected to multichannel services, and I think this is proof of it — it’s proof of the appeal of sports in a multichannel space.

MCN:Last year’s ESPN college-football championship telecast set an all-time cable viewing record. Do you foresee a repeat performance from this year’s telecast?

AB: I think we will. In many ways, we’re in a better position for that final championship game than we were last year, because viewers were still going through an educational process moving from the [Bowl Championship Series] to the [College Football Playoff] process. I think we’ve done an extraordinary job promoting this, heading into these last final weeks, and we know for a fact that knowledge about the College Football Playoff and also intent to view is very strong, for the simple reason that the fans understand what it’s all about, they understand the system and there’s a lot at stake. We’re looking forward to seeing the ratings after [tonight’s] final championship game. I think we will do very well and we’ll get off to a very, very fast start.

MCN:Should viewers look for anything different on-air from ESPN in 2016?

AB: I think we have a winning formula now, but we’ll have international soccer, Euro 2016, so that will help us out a bit. But beyond that, it’s a steady slate that will continue to pace us during the year.

SIDEBAR: Disney, Nick Win ’15 in Total Day

Disney Channel and Nickelodeon finished in a dead tie in 2015 for the top spot among cable networks on a 24-hour basis. Disney also matched Nick among kids 2-11 and was the top choice among kids 6-11 and tweens 9-14, according to Nielsen.

Most Watched Cable Networks Among Total Viewers, 2015 (Total Day)

Network                            Total Viewers
Disney Channel. . . . . . . . . . . .1.23 million
Nickelodeon . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1.23 million
Adult Swim. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.12 million
Fox News Channel . . . . . . . . .1.08 million
Cartoon Network . . . . . . . . . .1.00 million
USA Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . .974,000
ESPN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 906,000
TNT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 905,000
HGTV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 830,000
Nick at Nite. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .776,000

SOURCE: Nielsen

The worldwide leader is going even more "mega" with its coverage of the college football title tilt on Jan. 12.

Although network assigments have yet to be finalized, ESPN will expand the "megacast" from the final BCS championship game in 2014 with the upcoming College Football Playoff Naitonal Championship Game from AT&T Stadium.

ESPN will air a different versions of the game on each of its TV networks: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPNEWS, ESPN Classic and ESPN Goal Line. The SEC Network will also be in mix if top-ranked Alabama reaches the final.

ESPN3 will also feature “multiple options” according to the network.

ESPN will air the traditional coverage of the game, along with ESPN Radio, ESPN International networks and in Spanish on ESPN Deportes.

Among the options, some of which were featured last year,:  The “Film Room,” which features ESPN experts as well as guest coaches and players providing in-depth X and O analysis; “ESPN Voices,” which allows fans to eavesdrop on multiple ESPN on-air personalities representing a wide cross-section of sports and shows discussing the game; “Sounds of the Game,” an announcer-free telecast with only the natural sounds of the game and coverage of the halftime performances by each band; and “Command Center” which will provide enhanced statistics utilizing a split screen application with live game action and immediate replays of every play.

ESPN will also play in the social media space, with Facebook and Twitter part of its overall presentation game plan.

Such cross-network gambits are becoming increasingly common. In addition to the 2014 BCS Megacast for Florida State's last-second triumph over Auburn, Turner presented the NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four across three networks, TBS, TNT and truTV, last spring. For its part, Fox complemented its coverage of Game 1 of the 2014 National League Championship Series, with a stats-driven telecast on Fox Sports 1.

The title game will pit the winners of the semifinals, which ESPN will air on New Year’s Day: No. 2 Oregon vs. No. 3 Florida State and No. 1 Alabama vs. No. 4 Ohio State.